


You're a Loaded Line

by okaynowkiss



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes-centric, Getting Together, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Stucky Secret Santa 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 14:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9076738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okaynowkiss/pseuds/okaynowkiss
Summary: After Wakanda and the cryo chamber, once Bucky can trust his own mind again, what comes next?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merrythoughts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrythoughts/gifts).



> Written for the Stucky Secret Santa 2016 exchange, for Merrythought! I've had a version of this in my head since Civil War came out, so I was grateful to have this excuse to finally write it. Happy holidays/end of 2016 :)

There is nothing in his mind at all, and then there are a few notes of a song, mournful and low.

It’s a memory and there is no more of it than that.

He becomes aware of the cold slowly, and then all at once. Every nerve comes alive with the sharp pain of it. He gasps himself awake.

He is going to be hurt, and then he is going to have to hurt someone.

Hands touch him; it’s too bright to see; the hands are gentle.

The song again. From where does he remember it? What song is it? He can’t even recall enough to get at the melody.

He’s wrong. He isn’t a prisoner. The calm comes slowly; part of him resists it and the other part drags it forward.

Everything slots into place. T’Challa and the cryo tank in the Wakandan lab, all glass and steel and quiet. Zemo and the grainy videotape of the motorcycle on the dirt road. The long fight, his missing metal arm, and Steve.

“Bucky.” At Steve’s voice, he opens his eyes. Steve tugs off a surgical mask and breaks into a smile. “Morning.”

Bucky tries to smile back, but it feels like a grimace. He tries to talk, coughs, and tries again. “How long?” he asks, barely intelligible as his vocal cords remember how to work. Immediately there’s a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t try to talk yet, please, Mr. Barnes.” It’s a female doctor and she looks up from the digital tablet she’s holding to remove her own surgical mask after an exasperated glance at Steve. She smiles briefly at Bucky. “Can you move your right hand?”

He moves it.

“It hasn’t been long. Three months,” Steve tells him. And Bucky makes some kind of face about that, but he should’ve know. Steve looks exactly the same, nearly regulation haircut and modern dark jeans and everything. But three months is no time at all, and there’s no way they’ve figured out how to fix him so soon. He expected to be under for years, so this doesn’t seem right. Also, Steve’s nervous about something, and it’s making Bucky wary.

“Can you move your feet?” the doctor asks.

He moves them.

“You can just nod—do you remember what happened to your left arm?”

He nods.

“Does it hurt?”

He shakes his head and clears his throat experimentally. “I’m fine. I’m good.” He sits up, unbalanced even though he was expecting the lack of an arm, and on opposite sides of his hospital bed two hands shoot out to guide him back down. “Really,” he adds, and raises his hand. “I’m good.” He drops his head forward, stretches his neck. He touches his forehead, then his hair, and both shoulders pull in even though the left one has no hand to guide. He is careful not to dislodge the saline drip in his right forearm.

“There’s good news,” Steve says. “The doctors have made you an arm, if you want it.”

Bucky pushes the long hair out of his face and squints up at Steve. “Aren’t you skipping a couple steps, there? Go on, tell me what the plan is.”

There is an uncomfortable pause where Steve looks like he’s got something to say but doesn’t say it. After a glance at the doctor, he says, “We’re sitting down with the team in a few hours. But look, take some time to... wake up, first.”

“I’m wide awake, pal,” Bucky tells him. “I can take it.”

“We have a strategy, it’s true,” the doctor says. “And we want to go over it with you in detail. I would prefer to do that with all your charts and all my data in front of me, when you’ve been conscious for more than four minutes.”

Her stern tone is kind of comforting, really. Steve still doesn’t look happy, but Bucky agrees to wait.

+

It's slightly dangerous. That’s the catch. There’s a 3.5% chance that the procedure will leave him brain-dead. Steve looks absurdly guilty over it, but, well, math was never his strongest suit. Bucky signs the papers at once.

+

The surgery is done with lasers that work on his brain without breaking his skin, and there is no pain, and he is awake for it. The surgeons ask him questions and talk to him during it. At first, they have him recount memories from his childhood, and then from the first war. Little things. The color of a mug he drank out of in his mom’s kitchen, the sound of a tent flap being opened on a quiet night. They’re making a map of his brain. They have him close his eyes and visualize things. You are driving a car. You shift down to second gear and turn a corner. For the fourth or fifth time, the female surgeon, who was the doctor at his bedside when he woke up, begins the sequence: “Longing.”

They’re in a clean room from which Steve has vocally protested being barred.

“Rusted. Seventeen.”

Her Russian is lovely, unhurried and lilting, accented just perceptibly with the rounded sounds of her own language.

“Daybreak. Furnace.” A pause between each word. “Nine. Benign. Homecoming.”

This is the farthest they’ve gotten in the nasty little poem that is his trigger words. If they can make it all the way through with no reaction, they’ll know they were successful. Already, they have mostly severed the dangerous connections between neurons, because he doesn’t feel the hideous pulling away of his consciousness that he associates with these words. Still, he hates them.

“One.”

The hair on his arms stands up. He focuses on his breath.

“Freight car.”

He thinks of a collision, a great weight of metal twisting and wrapping perversely around the first solid thing it finds. The frozen train, the burning helicarriers, a car tipped off the road.

“Are you okay, Mr. Barnes?”

“Yeah, I’m—it’s working. It’s working so far.”

“I see that,” she says. “But are you okay? We can take a break.”

“Nah, I’m fine. You’re the ones doing the work here.”

It lasts another couple hours. Their technology is very finely tuned and they are being very cautious. He doesn’t think he should need to recover, the physical experience of the surgery being nothing more than lying down on a table, but when they wheel him into a dark room and instruct him to rest he finds that he he couldn’t stay awake if he tried.

His brain knits itself back together in twisting dreams that he doesn’t want to analyze. He wakes in the darkness and there’s someone sitting by his bed, or there isn’t, he isn’t sure. A few notes of the same song. The room swims away.

Is it possible that they have given him back control of his own mind and taken nothing from him in the process? He’s missing no memories that he can detect. Of course, it’s possible he wouldn’t know if he was missing anything. He would’ve let them go ahead with the procedure even if there had been some tradeoff. (Even if there had been a big tradeoff.) There’s always a flaw, and just because he hasn’t seen it yet doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

+

T'Challa stops by the gym on the third morning, but he's dressed for a business meeting (or a photo shoot—the guy never looks bad, is that what being a king is like?) so he doesn't seem to be planning to spar with them. He shakes Steve's hand warmly and then does the same with Bucky, and grips his forearm for a moment. “You look well. How is everything going?” he asks, brown eyes warm.

“It’s great—” He holds the new arm out for them to look at. “I’m not more than a day or two away from a hundred percent.”

“I’m glad you’re well,” T’Challa says, and smiles at him.

Sam arrives that day, and he picks up right where he left off, giving Bucky a hard time about everything and being really good to fight with. He brings Wanda Maximoff with him, and she’s fascinating too: she can see so much into everything, and she’s clearly just beginning to learn what her powers make her capable of. And Steve with her—when they’re not throwing large objects at each other’s heads—it’s like Steve with Bucky’s sisters, all those years ago.

Everything here is sweeter than it should be. The sound of bodies hitting the mat, the lessening pain in his arm, the text messages from Steve: "In the gym" or "Breakfast at mine in 30." And everything else. The color of the sky, the taste of water that is somehow different from anywhere else.

A memory he has not thought of in years and years comes to him: when he left New York for the first time, for boot camp, the water there tasted stale and it made him homesick. 

There are things about Steve that he won't need to remember. The way he fights and his voice when he's making a speech, his uniform and the shape of his jawline. Anyone can see those anytime they want, on YouTube and in history books. He could look them up if he wanted to be reminded, or to torture himself. He could keep a photo of Steve in a journal again. 

And there are things that only he knows about Steve, from so many years ago, that if he hasn't forgotten by now he's probably not going to lose. Steve as a child. How light his hair was and that pale Irish skin. What he looked like when he got punched in the face. Dirt on his collar and a boot print on his good white shirt when he was 13 and got beat up for looking at Doug Graves the wrong way. The things he called Doug after that to make Bucky laugh, to prove he was okay. How serious he always looked when he was winding up a handball pitch. (It always made Bucky crack up, and he never explained to Steve that he wasn't laughing to be cruel, which was what most laughter in the street among boys amounted to, but because it made him feel glad and light. Should he have said, or did Steve know?) How easily Bucky could make him laugh.

And then there are the things that he focuses on now. The things that make Steve who he is today. Everything he needs to learn by heart in the next few days. How carefully gentle he is when he is doing anything that isn’t violence. How he looks at Bucky with a mixture of fondness and something sharper. How his skin up close is still so pale as to be almost translucent, delicate, so lightly freckled.

Is it really only days that he has left with Steve? But it has to be. Anything more than that is dangerous, pointless. If he stays with Steve and the others longer than he needs to, they're the ones who will pay for it. He shouldn't be here at all, but T'Challa did earnestly try to kill him for a bit, and not that Bucky especially blames him for it, but he's not going to turn down a favor from a king, so. 

+

It’s four days later and Bucky’s been training hard with his new arm. Steve finds him in a palace courtyard, where he’s been reading a book of Wakandan history. He sits down next to him and surveys the courtyard expansively, arm slug over the back of the bench between him and Bucky. When Steve’s being Captain America, he takes up more space. “You don’t have to come,” Steve says by way of greeting, in his Cap voice. “But we’ve got a lead on a Hydra cell in London, and Sam, Wanda, and I, we’re going to take it out.”

Bucky chews his lip. He shouldn’t. He should be strong and split now, because this is only going to make it harder. But who’s he kidding? He can’t resist the chance to follow Steve Rogers one last time.

“Yeah, okay. I’m game. Time to field test this thing, anyway,” he says, flexing the fingers of his new arm. Steve watches the shifting plates of his hand, the subtly formed knuckles and the clever wrist. The arm is a god damn miracle of science and again there should be a flaw in it but there is not. (More likely: there is and he can’t see it yet.)

Steve’s trying not to smile. “You could throw a football or something,” he says, and he sounds like himself again, like just Steve. Not that there’s so much of a difference between the two versions, but it’s there if you know him. “Lift a couple cars. Other ways to make sure everything’s in working order.”

“Not as much fun, though,” Bucky says, and he smiles in return in a way that he has to consciously not hold back, because Steve wants him to come along and for once he gets to give Steve what he wants.

+

In the quinjet on the way, Steve talks to them about something him and Natasha have been working on. “There’s a safe house in Switzerland, and we think it could be a base of operations for us for awhile, until things cool down. It’s out of the way, but it’s got everything we need.”

The others talk details, and Bucky nods along and memorizes the way Steve’s eyes look when he smiles.

+

He’s crouching around a corner, as still as death, all his senses on high alert waiting for the first sign of anyone in the next room. The weight of the gun in his hand is as perfect as anything he has every felt, heavy and deadly and balanced, and the thought occurs to him that he is never more alive than this. The Soldier, in the moment before the fight. His body is a bowstring pulled taut, made and ready for one thing. He has no past; there is only this. His consciousness is the shape of the room he’s staking out and the hallway where he’s hiding.

A hydraulic door swishes open and shoes with rubber soles walk across the floor. Five steps. He waits. A metal object is set down on a table and in the moment between first impact and the settling of the object, he is up and around the corner and his gun is at the man’s temple. He shoves one hand inside the man’s mouth, holding his tongue in place, preventing him from swallowing, and digs out the cyanide capsule and hurls it, dripping with spit, across the room. He gathers the man’s arms behind his back. The guy’s a scientist, not a fighter, not really, although they are all trained and they all will fight. “I’ll break your arm,” Bucky warns him, but the man whispers, “Hail Hydra,” and kicks at him with the blade in the heel of his shoe, and even though it only nicks the shaft of Bucky’s boot, the man’s screams echo through the corridor when Bucky breaks both of his arms.

+

It’s a success all around, except that their quinjet is hobbled by a lucky shot from what looks like an anti-tank gun, and they’ve got to wait until a part is couriered out before it can take off again.

Bucky should leave, in any case. But he wants to wrap up this mission properly, everyone strapped into the jet and flying off somewhere safe, and it just doesn’t feel quite over yet. So he checks into the hotel with them, goes out with Sam to find takeout while Steve debriefs with Nat over the phone and Wanda showers blood out of her hair.

When it gets too nice, he thinks of the fight with Iron Man, and how easy it was to turn even a close friend of Steve’s against him. He reminds himself that what he is most of all is a liability to these people who are trying to do good. (To Steve, who has only ever tried to do good.)

+

While Steve's in the shower and Sam's devouring a hamburger, Wanda Maximoff knocks on their door. She’s got a purpling bruise around one eye, which makes it hard to look at her, but she seems otherwise intact.

She sinks into the chair next to Sam, and Bucky goes back to cleaning their guns. The repetition and peaceful purpose has always calmed him after a fight.

He thinks of Steve in the shower, the warm night outside and the curtained dark of their room. He tries to fix it all in his memory. He tries to think of nothing, because he doesn’t trust that Maximoff can’t see all of his thoughts anyway.

As if on cue, she says, “So where is it you’re going after this?”

He hasn’t said he was staying with them, but he’s known that it’s what both Steve and Sam expect.

“What do you mean?” Sam says around a mouthful of food before he can get a word in. He just sounds curious.

“Yeah, what do you mean?” Bucky hedges.

She makes an unimpressed face. “You aren’t staying with us. This was a one-time thing. Right?”

“How would you know that, Scarlet Witch?” he asks lightly, and doesn’t stop pulling the oil rag down the barrel of the gun in his lap.

“It’s obvious,” she says. “You’re obvious.”

“Uh—” Sam cuts in. “Wasn’t obvious to me. I thought the idea was we’d all team up. No?”

“I’m not so much of a team player,” Bucky says, and smiles grimly.

Sam sets down his food and wipes his fingers on a napkin. “Does Steve know this? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know this.”

“I don’t know, I’m not a mind reader,” Bucky says, just to be difficult.

“You know he wants you here, right?” Sam says, also, apparently, just to be difficult. “He’s like, all happy. That thing he does where he snaps his fingers, he didn’t used to do that. Don’t get me wrong, it’s embarrassing and I wish he would stop, but—”

And that’s sad and Bucky will file it away to feel like shit about later, but for now, he’s looking at Wanda. There’s something guarded in her face. “I have a feeling you’re not gonna ask me to stay.”

She takes a bite of a cheeseburger and doesn’t rush to chew it. “Why is it you’re leaving?”

“Like I said, I work alone. I’m too big of a target. Especially...” The water in the bathroom shuts off and they all look at each other.

“I’ll finish this in my room,” Wanda says, and scoops up her burger and like three things of fries. “But before we go—” She kicks Sam’s chair to include him in that ‘we’ and he makes a face at her— “You should know we’re all targets.” And suddenly it’s like she’s looking right into the center of his mind, and he both wants to look away and desperately doesn’t. “And I’m not afraid of you, and I would work with you. But we all have to make a choice. And if this isn’t the choice you want to make, then it will be worse for all of us if you stay. So. You choose. We’ll be here.”

She goes and Sam stands and stretches and starts to gather his things. Steve comes out of the bathroom running a towel over his damp hair. “Hey, where’s everybody going?”

“Tired,” Sam says. “Catch you guys in the morning?”

“Later,” Bucky says.

“Yeah, sure,” Steve agrees. “Good job today.”

“You too,” Sam says. He claps Steve on the shoulder, smiles, and leaves with a bag of food.

Steve sits down at the little hotel table. “Is this for us?” he asks, pulling food out of the remaining bag.

“That’s all you, I ate already,” Bucky says.

“Thanks.” Steve tucks in and for a few minutes there’s just the crinkle of food wrappers and the clank of gunmetal.

And then Bucky feels Steve’s eyes on him, and when he looks up, Steve smiles one of his most Steve smiles and says, “I know you’re leaving.”

“Wanda told you,” Bucky guesses.

Steve raises his eyebrows. “Nope. She didn’t, actually.” His tone means that he’s purposefully tabling that for later. “But I know you, and when I talked about that spot in Switzerland, I saw the way you looked at me. Like I was dreaming.”

“Yeah, well,” Bucky says. He feels like he should apologize for that, but it isn’t untrue. “I would’ve said, but I meant to leave before you had to try to stop me.”

“Would it be so terrible?” Steve asks. He gestures toward the other rooms, toward Wanda and Sam. “I know you’ve been working alone for awhile, but they’re good at what they do. We’ve helped a lot of people. They’re good teammates. And _we_ were a good team,” Steve says, his voice getting softer, “a long time ago, and I have a feeling we still are. We did good out there today.”

“It’s not about that,” Bucky says, suddenly annoyed. “You know I’m too dangerous to keep around. I’m not good for this.” He shakes his head. “Don’t play dumb about this. Not you.”

Steve manages to look both like he’s been slapped and like he’s very disappointed. “If you thought I’d agree with that, you’re the one who’s playing dumb,” he says.

Bucky stands up and lets the gun parts on his lap roll away, and Steve pushes out his chair and stands, too. Bucky hadn’t meant to make it aggressive, but it’s fine, it’s easier that way. “How do you not see what I am to you?” Bucky asks.

Something crosses over Steve’s face. “What do you mean,” he says, stilted, like the words are being pulled out of him.

Bucky looks at him with love and pity and spells it out for him. “I'm a thing bad guys can use against you whenever they want to. It’s the reason you’re on the run instead of at home. Zemo’s plan worked because he knew you’d protect me from Stark after he found out what I did, and I won’t let it keep happening. I won’t let that be my role in your life.”

“You get to choose what your role is,” Steve says in his Cap voice. And that voice makes it easier to argue with him.

“Other people have chosen for me plenty of times,” Bucky says, even though it isn’t fair to use that against Steve, who never has. “What about the people who get hurt the next time someone tries to get at you through me?”

“Buck, come on, this is a dangerous line of work, but it’s the one I chose!” Steve says, and he’s right up in Bucky’s face now. “People who can be used against me? That’s—that’s what friends are, you know? That’s teammates.”

“Yeah, but I give ‘em a little more ammo than most people,” Bucky says. It’s more awful than he expected, saying this, arguing for this, asking Steve to send him away.

“I don’t care!” Steve exclaims, and it’s perversely satisfying that he’s losing his cool too.

“I know, you’re selfless,” Bucky says. He’s being cruel and he can’t stop himself from pushing at the boundary between them. He _wants_ to hurt Steve, even, just to see him crack a little. “I’m so sick of how selfless you are, if you want to know the truth.”

Steve laughs, a short and helpless sound. He turns away, and the anger in Bucky’s chest sparks. Bucky wants to shove him out of the room, for not being able to look, for being the person that he is, for making it so hard to leave him. None of this is fair.

“Christ,” Steve says after a moment. He straightens his shoulders and turns back, steeled. There is something dangerous and determined in his eyes. “You don’t even know why you should be mad at me. You think I’m being selfless? _I want you to stay with me._ ” He says it slowly. “I’m—” He’s getting worked up; Bucky can see him struggling to keep the volume in his voice down. “Of course I want you to be safe and—and _happy_.”

“All right, stop,” Bucky says, because something is about to happen, and he’s not sure he wants it to.

As ever, Steve barrels on. “But if you want to go, I should let you choose to go. Because I know that you haven’t gotten to choose many things.” This time when he has to stop it’s because his voice has gone thick, liquid, because—absurdly—he is about to cry.

“Jesus, okay,” Bucky says and reaches a hand out. He has to get Steve to shut up, he can’t hear this.

Steve shoves his hand away. In the pause, he’s mastered his voice again. “But I don’t want to be alone anymore.” He shrugs, and smiles in a way that means he is laughing at himself.

“Oh, man, you aren’t even alone,” Bucky says, although this isn’t really what he means to argue. “You’ve got Sam, and Natasha. And all of them.”

“I don’t want them. I just want you.”

The air goes still, the room sharp with silence. Steve laughs again, shortly, an unfunny sound. Bucky twists his mouth to the side.

Voice low and catching in his throat, Steve says, "You're the one thing I wanted back and thought I could have. I wouldn't make you stay. But I want you to know—what you are to me? Buck, I—" He shakes his head, lashes dark.

Bucky lifts a hand to Steve’s elbow and tightens his fingers around it. He's standing so close and it's breaking his heart open to see Steve like this and do nothing about it. He tilts his head, tries for a charming smile, but it just makes Steve's face crumple a little more. He's trying so hard to be stoic. "Aw, hey," Bucky says, just very quietly, trying to lighten the mood. Impulsively, he runs his thumb along Steve's cheekbone. Steve turns into the touch, shuts his eyes, and Bucky's hand comes away wet.

He steps in and kisses Steve’s cheek, where his hand just was. He hears Steve’s breath catch. Steve takes Bucky’s elbows in his hands and holds him in place. Bucky kisses the corner of his jaw, the outside of his eye, and leaves his nose against the short blonde hair at Steve’s ear.

Nothing he can’t take back has happened yet. Surely, for any one of a thousand reasons, he will have to take this back.

Steve is so warm and solid and Bucky wants nothing more than to nuzzle all the parts of himself that have been cold for so long up against him. Steve’s hand slides into his hair and he presses his lips to Bucky’s cheekbone, his jaw, the corner of his eye.

“Stay for the night,” Steve says, and that’s definitely not his Captain America voice.

Finally, Bucky kisses him. He kisses and kisses him, and Steve responds at once, wrapping his arms around him and kissing back. They break apart, noses together. Everything is their breath and the warmth of their bodies. “Then what?” Bucky asks.

“I don’t know,” Steve says. He noses under Bucky’s jaw and plants an open-mouth kiss on his neck that makes Bucky’s knees feel weak. “Decide in the morning. Or don’t.” He pulls back enough that they can look each other in the eye and holds Bucky’s face in his hands. “I missed you so much,” he says, sounding younger than Bucky’s heard him in so many years, and helpless.

“I love you so much,” Bucky says in the same voice. And he didn’t mean to say it but he can’t regret it either, it’s so true.

Steve nods and kisses his cheeks, his eyelids. “I love you so much,” he agrees.

It’s such a stupid relief to have said it that Bucky can’t quite figure out how he didn’t do it before now. Maybe this is the first time the stars have aligned for them. Or maybe he should’ve taken a chance before now.

Later, in bed, when he’s letting Steve trail a tired hand across his bare chest, head resting on Bucky’s shoulder, Bucky says, “Hey. Do you know what this is?” And he hums the part of the song he can remember from when he was just waking up out of cryo.

“Hmm?” Steve says.

Bucky presses his nose and lips to Steve’s hair and hums it again. “That’s all I remember. I can’t get to the rest of it.”

“I’ll think about it,” Steve says. He kisses Bucky’s collarbone, his sternum, and keeps going down, and Bucky forgets about the song.

+

Hours later, but while it’s still dark out, Bucky wakes up to Steve squeezing his arm. “Bucky. Hey. Are you listening? It’s this, right?” And he hums the tune Bucky remembered, a little slow and sad, and then the rest of the melody, resolving prettily.

“That’s it,” Bucky says, still partly asleep, and so happy, and hides his smile against Steve’s skin. “What is it?”

“I don’t know what it’s called, but it would play on the radio when we were, what, fifteen maybe. I remember hearing it in your kitchen when your mom was cooking.”

“Good thing you’re here,” Bucky says, and kisses him and pulls him in, and they fall asleep together again.

+

When the room is light with low sun through the curtains, Bucky wakes up again. He could slip out. He’s gone back and forth ten times over the course of the night. He should leave. He still thinks he should leave.

And yet.

He presses his lips to Steve’s forehead, gently so as not to wake him. This is definitely going to be a mess. This is not going to work out cleanly.

Steve said he was being selfish, and maybe that’s true, to the extent that he is capable of being selfish. Bucky definitely is.

But Steve had been so plain about what it is that he wants, and Bucky has always trusted him. _Just for a little while_ , Bucky prays to whoever’s listening. _Let us have this._

He tucks his nose into Steve’s shoulder, and goes back to sleep.

 


End file.
